[richthegeek]

Does everything need to have monetary value? Learning a language can be done for many reasons.

I know a bit of Spanish because I holiday in Spain occasionally, although lately it has become valuable as we are working in LatAm a bit.

I know passable Italian purely because it was enjoyable to learn. It has since been useful on two vacations across Italy.

And finally I'm learning Polish due to my partner being Polish. It's hard as hell compared to Romance languages, but it'll be worth it when I can have a conversation with her parents beyond courtesies.

[carlmungz]

How did your knowledge of Spanish help with learning Italian?

[richthegeek]

It helped a bit, in that the breaking the habit of English sentence structure exhibited in "I want it" to "(yo) lo quiero" rather than "yo quiero lo" had already happened somewhat.

On the flipside, it made my Spanish vocab quite a bit worse as I keep recalling the Italian word in place. Happily this doesn't lead to many problems in reality, most Spaniards I have interacted with have either understood the word anyway or I could recall the correct word quickly.